Big Boy Bed!!

We live in a wonderfully cozy, little 100 year old home. With these types of houses come charm and character and unfortunately small rooms. As a result, one is afforded the opportunity to get creative with creating space.

When we were in the throws of expectation and Pax was en route, we carefully chose his gorgeous bedroom furniture with the future in mind. A lovely DaVinci Parker convertible crib was purchased (thanks granny!) This one piece was supposed to get him through his entire growing up and into adulthood. Crib to toddler bed to full size bed. Great thought! Great plan!! That is until we discovered that a full bed would eat almost all of the square footage in his room and leave no space to play and grow.

I had seen on Pinterest (hooray for Pinterest!) how a woman had taken a simple loft bed and made it even more awesome. It had a great play space underneath that would allow Pax the chance to really enjoy his bedroom, but it wasn't too tall, so it could possibly fit our groovy pitched ceilings! Of course I had to find that bed! And there it was, right on the Ikea website, ready for the awesome to happen. I took measurements and surprisingly enough it would work! So I set my sights on getting my boy that bed.

At first P was resistant. He's not real keen on change. I tried getting him excited about it, showed him all sorts of pictures and expressed scenarios that would feed his interests. Still a big "meh". The last ditch effort was getting him in the store to play on it. So we did. So he did. So we brought the bed home (along with a family of stuffed rats). Fait accompli!

We started setting it up right away. About a quarter of the way through I had to put P to sleep in mommy & daddy's bed. Around 1:30 AM the bed was assembled and two tired, happy parents set it up and had some fun decorating it with various stuffed animals. We hung opossums on the rungs of the ladder, had a big shark greet him at the top, strung snakes, lined up armadillos and pelicans along the edges and had a big warthog looking over the side. Underneath we sat his giant cheetah Blur, orangutan Climbster, Kingo the gorilla and a family of giraffes. We could hardly wait for morning!

We joined little bear in our bed, simply giddy with anticipation. It was almost as good as Christmas. We could hardly wait for him to wake up and see it!

To say Pax liked his new room is an understatement!! He was completely "wow"ed and wound up spending the entire day playing there. I could tell he loved it when he piled it full of animals and books - his two most favorite things. We built a fort underneath and played with his flashlight and dream light. Animals went underneath. Animals went on top. Animals were tossed overboard. It quickly became a pirate ship and animals even had to walk the plank. He could see out the window now and reach the books on his shelf and even get eye to eye with Terry the Terrific Pterodactyl! It was crazy awesome super groovy cool!

Ya know, it's a very bitter sweet experience getting the big boy bed. It was hard to watch the crib/toddler bed go into storage, but the sheer joy and abounding fun that has been had is worth the couple of little tears I shed. He's growing up, but in such a fantastically fun way!